Predicting College Football Games
2024 Season Predictions
This page displays predictions for upcoming games in the 2024 college football season. These predictions come from a model built on historical college football play by play and game data in order to simulate upcoming games. All data is from collegefootballdata.com. Any mistakes are my own.
Week 4 Predictions
The following table displays estimates and predictions for the upcoming week’s college football games.
Betting Lines
How do these predictions compare to betting lines? I compare my predicted spread against the opening spread from ESPN Bet.
The following table displays my prediction for each game compared to opening betting lines from various providers.
Results as of Week 4
How has the model performed to date?
The model predicts the probability that the home team will win and their expected margin of victory (or defeat). I assess the model’s performance by assessing the accuracy of its predictions (win/loss), the logloss of its probabilities, and the mean absolute error of the predicted margin.
The following plot shows my model’s predicted margin of victory vs the actual margin of victory for all games so far this season.
| Season Model Results | |||||
| season | season_type | games | accuracy | mn_log_loss | mae |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | regular | 305 | 0.777 | 0.399 | 14.93 |
| Model Results by Week | ||||||
| season | season_type | week | games | accuracy | mn_log_loss | mae |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | regular | 1 | 100 | 0.870 | 0.266 | 15.210 |
| 2024 | regular | 2 | 78 | 0.679 | 0.505 | 16.077 |
| 2024 | regular | 3 | 63 | 0.810 | 0.376 | 14.857 |
| 2024 | regular | 4 | 64 | 0.719 | 0.499 | 13.164 |
Previous Predictions
The following table displays the model’s predictions for previous weeks along with the actual result.
Against the Spread
How has the model performed against the spread? I compare my model’s predictions against betting lines from various providers.
| season | week | .metric | Bovada | DraftKings | ESPN Bet |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 1 | accuracy | 0.535 | 0.535 | 0.506 |
| 2024 | 2 | accuracy | 0.521 | 0.510 | 0.436 |
| 2024 | 3 | accuracy | 0.462 | 0.519 | 0.460 |
| 2024 | 4 | accuracy | 0.556 | 0.541 | 0.531 |
The following table displays my model’s prediction in previous weeks against betting lines.
Upcoming Games
The following table displays predictions for all upcoming games based on the results of the season so far.